ASRC 2021: Week 2

Hello everyone, and welcome back. If you need a refresher on the rules, check out our blog post from last week. We love hearing about what you're doing, so be sure to drop a comment down below. Once you do, fill out this form to enter for one of our great prizes.

Here's this week's Monopoly Board.

Current Monopoly Board

Now for this week's staff participation:

Elizabeth: This week I rolled a 5 and landed on Mystery. I chose to read Monday’s Not Coming by Tiffany D. Jackson. It’s a YA novel (as we go through the summer you’ll notice I mostly read YA.) In it, Claudia’s best friend, Monday, has gone missing. Nobody has seen her in months and Claudia is the only one who seems to care. Claudia launches an investigation and tries to find out where her friend is. The characters in this book are rich and well developed and there is a twist at the end that destroyed me emotionally and left me sobbing. I give it 5/5 stars.

Elias: This week, I rolled a 10 and landed on Classic Literature, a space which filled me with much dread. Most of the time when I pick something classic to read, I'm reading it on and off for the better part of three months, either because of size or density. So that I could squeeze one in during the week, I picked a shorter novel: Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neal Hurston. It took a bit for me to find my groove, as Hurston writes dialog with an eye for evoking the way words would sound when spoken aloud, channeling the Black Southern drawl of the late 19th & early 20th century, but once I found it, the book flew by.

It's a book where not a lot happens, which is exactly what I needed, and yet we're given a portrait of a life to understand, some parts well-lived, and other parts not. It's a beautiful novel, even when it is ugly, and contemplating the myriad ways one group (parents/grandparents, men, neighbors, White Americans, rich, poor) foist their hopes and dreams, fears and insecurities, hate and love, on each other, usually to the detriment of the ones receiving it. Classics are usually sad, and this one is no exception, but it is not written to make you cry; at least, it didn't make me cry. Instead, I came away from Their Eyes Were Watching God with a slight smile on my face, glad to have been taken on this journey by Hurston.

I give it 5/5 stars.

We'll see you back here next Monday with our next post!